October 16 - Noah Webster

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On this day, in 1758, the Father of American Education, Noah Webster Jr., was born in what became West Hartford, Connecticut. Noah came from an established family: his mother was a descendant of William Bradford, the Governor of the Plymouth Colony, and his father’s ancestor was one of the first Governors of the Connecticut Colony. Both his parents placed a high importance on education. His mother taught him spelling, math and music until he was old enough to attend a local school run by the Evangelical Society. Noah considered his teachers there to be so awful that he vowed to make the educational system better for future generations. At the age of 14, he started studying Latin with his minister in preparation for college and became a freshman at Yale two years later.

Noah’s time at Yale coincided with the early years of the American Revolution. As a result of the fighting going on, his classes had to frequently change not just rooms within the university but whole towns. He easily graduated in 1778 but didn’t really have any plans for the rest of his life. He tried teaching for a short while but found the working conditions to be terrible and quit. He then began to study law under Oliver Ellsworth, a future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Noah passed his bar exam in 1781, but since there was still a war going on, couldn’t find work as a lawyer. So he returned to Yale and earned a Master’s degree.

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With credentials in hand, Noah moved to Goshen, New York and established a private school for the children of parents who could afford the best education money could buy. The money the school provided allowed him to write a number of early textbooks. His most famous textbook would be the “Blue-Backed Speller,” so called because its cover was blue though its actual title was The American Spelling Book. It would hang around for decades teaching generations of American school students how to spell and helped create the competition that only a handful of kids in each school actually enjoys, the spelling bee. Noah also provided a basis for grammar and reading education with separate textbooks for each. In an effort to improve the educational system, he followed the ideas of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, adjusting his lessons to a child’s cognitive development, mastering basic concepts before adding new, more complex layers of understanding onto that foundation. Nowadays that might not seem to be a radical method of teaching, but back then it was.

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While teaching the rich kids of Goshen and developing his textbooks, Noah also wrote a series of articles praising the American Revolutionary effort and declaring that the split with England was by its very existence permanent. His writing brought him to the attention of major players in the federal government. In 1793, Alexander Hamilton enticed him to give up teaching and move to New York City (then the national capital) to edit the newspaper of the Federalist Party. Within months, Noah had founded the city’s first daily newspaper, the American Minerva, which would continue to be published until 1904. He was a staunch defender of Presidents George Washington and John Adams, a stance which caused opponents of their policies to brand him an incurable lunatic and a pusillanimous, half-begotten, self-dubbed patriot (some things never change). Between his newspaper articles, textbooks and political essays, Noah was one of the most prolific authors at the beginning of the nation. A bibliography of all his known works runs to over 650 pages all on its own. And that doesn’t include the work he is arguably most famous for producing.

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In 1806, Noah published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. He claimed on the first page that it contained 5,000 more words than any other dictionary. The following year he began revising and expanding his dictionary. The new edition would take him more than twenty years to compile. Along the way, Noah learned twenty-eight different languages just so he could determine the origins of certain words. His main goal behind the book was to homogenize the language of the United States as much as possible, including grammar usage and spellings. Many people think that he invented the American spellings of English words (think color vs. colour), but he just favored simpler, more phonetic spellings and borrowed them whenever he found them. He finally published the first edition of his new dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, in 1828. It reportedly contained over 12,000 words that had never been published in a dictionary before.

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Though dictionaries would eventually become highly venerated works, Noah’s first edition only sold 2,500 copies. That didn’t stop him from immediately developing a second edition, even though he had to mortgage his home in order to finance it. Plagued with debt the rest of his life, he still managed to get the second edition published in 1840. His efforts would go largely unrecognized during his lifetime. Just after revising the dictionary’s appendix a few years later, he would pass away at the age of 84 on May 28, 1843. You can probably guess the last name of the brothers who acquired the publishing rights to his seminal work from his estate. It was George and Charles Merriam. And the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is still published today.

It should be noted that Noah added one other significant accomplishment to his resume during his lifetime. In 1831, he successfully lobbied Congress to overhaul the national copyright statutes for the first time. The length of initial copyright was doubled to 28 years and musical compositions were protected for the first time.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Ham Luske